Domestic Violets (6 page)

Chapter 9

A
nd here I
am again, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror.

They’re like loaded guns, these pills, and my eyes are red and everything in the room that’s supposed to be white is now bluish. These are both normal side effects, according to the box, so I shouldn’t worry. An abnormal side effect, one that I hope to avoid tonight, is a four-hour boner.

I check my hair and mess it up a little. Then I spray some cologne in the air and quickly walk through it. This is what teenage girls do before the big dance, but I don’t want to smell like I’ve been in the bathroom blasting myself with cologne.

Shirtless, I examine my chest and biceps before dropping to the floor for fifteen quick push-ups. The last five are harder than I imagined they’d be.

The blood, moving through my body now, has added some definition where definition should go, at least a little, and I feel suddenly awake and tingly with sensation.

“You look good,” I tell my reflection. “Hot?” But this last part comes out with a question mark at the end. I’ve never been good at sales.

My heart feels strange in my chest, like it’s beating through mud, but these are the risks a man takes sometimes in the name of sexual competence. It’d be an embarrassing way to die, though, felled by a heart attack with an absurd hard-on standing at attention from my own dead body like an Italian baguette.

In our bedroom, the Victoria’s Secret outfit is tucked safely into its dresser drawer and there are no candles or music. Anna is lying beneath the covers with her eyes closed and a copy of
Runner’s World
magazine open across her chest. I fall onto the bed, landing on my side like some doofus being cute in a movie, but Anna doesn’t stir, and for a moment I watch her sleep. Her moisturizer has left a little streak on one of her cheeks and her mouth is just barely open. I used to fuck this woman, when we were younger. It’s an ugly word in marriage, “fuck,” but that’s what we did. We didn’t make love or fool around, we fucked like people who didn’t know any better or didn’t care to do anything else. It wasn’t scheduled or worried about or something done when they’re wasn’t anything good on TV. It was an effortless thing, like breathing, something so natural and fantastic. I don’t remember when it became something that I had to think about so much or gear up for in the bathroom.

I nudge her shoulder. “You awake?”

She opens her eyes and says hello, and I rub a streak of moisturizer into her cheek. Just this simple contact, the warmth of her skin, starts things moving in my body—blood flowing and gathering—and I feel kind of dizzy, but not in a bad way. I cross the neutral zone between us and kiss her cheek, finding an earlobe and biting there lightly. I don’t know if it’s the pill or the fact that I know I’ve taken the pill, but I feel urgent and affectionate, and these goddamn things really work.

“Did you put on cologne?” she asks.

“What? No, this is what sexy smells like.” I slide one hand beneath the covers and find her belly and run my fingertips across the ripples of her rib cage. Her lips are soft and warm against mine, and I feel myself getting harder. The pulse in my head is beating and I move to her neck where things are warmer and softer still.

That’s when I realize that I seem to be doing this alone. Anna is completely still. “Are you OK?” I ask.

She looks at me, totally void of anything even resembling desire, and the whites of her eyes, big in the glow of her reading lamp, look blue. I recognize this face. It’s the face of an Anna who’s been thinking. Thinking too much.

“So, you hate your job, right?” she says.

I look at her for a moment and then I look around the room, wondering if perhaps I missed something while I was in the bathroom doing my push-ups. “Of course. It’s killing me slowly, like asbestos.”

This is the answer she was prepared to hear, and she sits up against the headboard. “Then, I think you should do something about it. You’ve been there for years, and you’re always talking about how screwed they’d be without you. If that’s really true, then they should promote you to something better, or at least give you a raise. And if they won’t do that, then you should let them know that you’re not afraid to look for something else.”

“Umm, not sure if you’ve been watching the news on a different channel or something, but this might not be the best time to pull ultimatums at the office.”

“Or maybe it’s the
perfect
time.”

I get the sense that my wife’s been through this conversation in her head already. She wrote the script this afternoon on the treadmill, and I’m really pretty defenseless here. Forethought is perhaps their greatest weapon against us.

“You’re good at your job, right? You pretend like you don’t care about it, but if you’d actually apply yourself and take it seriously, you’d be doing everyone a big favor.”

“I’m not pretending,” I say. “I’m not that good of an actor. I really
don’t
care about my job.”

“Then why are you worried about losing it?” She takes a breath. “I can tell you’re worried about getting fired. You can sneak upstairs and smoke up with your dad like a teenager all you want, it doesn’t matter. I know you. You’ve let yourself get into a position where you’re afraid that something you hate is going to go away. You’re like those women in Lifetime movies. You’re terrified your abusive husband’s going to leave you.”

Things had been looking up for a minute there, but now, as my wife ventures into the metaphorical, all my blood is diverting back toward the unimportant parts of my body.

“I know that you and I aren’t exactly corporate geniuses here,” I say, appealing to a sense of commonality. “But I think just about everyone’s afraid of losing their paycheck right now. This isn’t about having a fulfilling job. It’s about being able to afford groceries.”

Anna laughs. Apparently I’ve said something ridiculous. “Tom, Curtis is always trying to give us things. You think he’s going to let us starve?”

“Jesus,” I say. “He already gave us this house. Is that not at all embarrassing for you? We’re almost thirty-six years old.”

She takes my hand with both of hers. “I don’t want to sound like the type of wife who says something like this, but that’s really your fault, Tom, OK? You refuse to ask for a raise, or to make any attempt to get a promotion, or to take on any more responsibility, or, God forbid, to look for a job that doesn’t make you want to blow your brains out. You have ten years of writing experience. If you wanted to, you could be making
way
more, and we wouldn’t be living paycheck to paycheck and accepting houses from your dad.”

“Wow, I didn’t realize that it’s 1953 all of the sudden,” I say. “You make less than I do, Anna. A hell of a lot less. How about you go storming into your office tomorrow and start demanding things?”

She lets go of my hand, and I see Hank’s head poking up from the foot of the bed as he studies the tones of our voices. “I help poor children learn to read, Tom. What does your company do again? I always forget? Something really noble, right?”

I lie on my back and so does she, and a long silence fills the growing expanse in the bed between us. I realize that the television is on—the volume turned all the way down. Lately I’ve been surrounded by muted televisions. Over the anchor’s shoulder, there’s a graphic of a red arrow pointing down.

“I just don’t understand what’s keeping you there,” she says, looking at the ceiling. “What’s keeping you from moving forward? I’m not a Stepford Wife, Tom. I don’t want a fur coat and a BMW. I just want to be able to actually afford the baby that we’re trying to have. Or, at least the one
I’m
trying to have.”

Married couples really only have a few arguments. They just keep having them over and over again. “This isn’t my career. You know that. This isn’t what I want to do with my life.”

“I know that. I’m not saying you have to stop writing, or that you have to give up on your book. I just think you need to start being more realistic about the world. You’re an adult. We have a family. You’ve been working on your book for—”

“I
am
being realistic. The day you take on a
real
job with
real
responsibilities, that’s the day you’re done writing. You become some poser with five chapters of some shitty novel in your bottom drawer that you’re never going to be able to finish because you’ve got screaming kids downstairs and some bullshit presentation to give about some useless buzzword. You know what my dad was doing before his first novel? Stamping books at the American University library for minimum wage, and he just won the Pulitzer Prize.”

“You’re not as good as your father, Tom,” she says, her voice suddenly loud. “You’re not Curtis, OK? I mean, for Christ’s sake, wouldn’t you know by now if you were?”

In the silence that follows—a silence even longer than the one before, long enough for the lamps to turn off and the room to go dark and quiet—I think of all the arguments we’ve had and all of the regrettable things we’ve said to each other since our first silly fights over stupid shit when we were dating. They all seem to have culminated into that.

“It’s done, by the way,” I say. “I finished it.”

I wonder if she’s even heard me, if she’s simply fallen asleep beside me. “Really?” she asks, finally. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s been a long time since you asked.”

I’ve been working on this thing for so long, and now it’s done, but it feels stupid now. Years ago, when I’d just started writing it, I used to print pages for her as I went and she’d read them in front of me. I used to imagine bringing it to her, finished, in a box, surprising her with it.

“I’ll read it on the train when I go to Boston,” she says, and then she says nothing else. Katie read my novel in two days. This girl who shouldn’t even give a shit took my book to bed with her and snuck away from work to finish it, and my wife wants to save it for her upcoming work trip.

Anna is absolutely right. I’m not my father. By the time he was my age, he’d published four novels, won two major literary prizes, and left his first wife.

I wake up sometime later, in the middle of the night. My head is throbbing steadily, my stomach hurts, and I’m sweating. I’m thinking of Katie, because, I realize, I was dreaming of Katie. It was as vivid a dream as I’ve had since I was a kid, so vivid that it takes me minutes to fully accept that it didn’t happen, that she didn’t come into my office, close the door, and start kissing me.

Beneath our sheets, my cock is so hard that I actually gasp in the dark. My normal, average-as-can-be penis has been replaced with something cartoonish and chemically altered, like a penis from the future. I close my eyes and try to do the impossible, to allow that strange dream thread to continue on again. Katie is there, and she smells like shampoo and her corduroy jacket is the only thing she’s wearing. As I kiss the dream version of this lovely girl, my mind wanders.

I’ve pretended to suffer for my art, telling my wife and even myself that I’ve suspended my life and stayed at my ridiculous job out of dedication to my book. But that book is done, and I’m lying in bed looking forward to tomorrow because I will walk into that dreadful office and the first person I see will be Katie.

I don’t want this dream to be over. I want to stay here where I am, but Anna rolls over, sighing in her sleep, and I’m fully awake. Dream Katie is gone. Anna kicks me, and in the perpetual half dark of our room, sighs again, and one sleepy arm drifts back and rests over her head on the pillow. The other arm soon follows and she kicks the blankets down until they rest on her hips. Her nightshirt is pulled against her breast, crooked and tight on her body, and a shadow falls across her stomach. She sighs again, which becomes a soft moan from somewhere deep in her chest. I sit up, and she’s whispering something, but I can’t understand her, more sighs and half words. When she moans again, I recognize it and her breath becomes short and fast.

“God,” she says, barely a whisper, and she arches her back.

She bites her lower lip and her face is beautiful but from this angle, in the low, shadowy light, it’s like the face of a stranger.

“Fuck me,” she says, but it’s so soft that maybe she hasn’t said anything at all.

I am next to her, listening to her. I want to touch her but I can’t, because she’ll wake up and I’ll have to explain this. I want to touch her, but I can’t, because I’m angry at her and she’s angry with me, and even though I love her, I don’t like her as much as I should.

She’s right next to me. I’m alone and she’s alone. We have never been farther apart.

Part II

Chapter 10

I
watched Letterman all
the time when I was a kid, and then in college, but I can’t remember the last time I saw more than his monologue. He’s gotten more political as he’s gotten older, and he and Paul Shaffer are talking about the election and the economy. John McCain was supposed to be on the show a few days ago, but he canceled at the last minute to deal with the financial crisis, whatever that even means, and Letterman is obviously still pissed.

“Is Grandpa gonna read from one of his books?” Allie asks. She’s excited to be up at this hour, even if she doesn’t completely understand why. She’s wearing pajamas with dolphins on them and she smells like a bowl of mixed candy.

“No, honey,” I say. “He’s gonna read jokes.”

“He doesn’t write jokes. He writes books.”

“You’re right. Someone else wrote these jokes, and now he’s reading them on TV.”

“That’s not fair,” she says. “The people who wrote the jokes should be able to read them.”

I consider trying to break this concept down for my daughter, but I don’t even know where I’d begin. But then Anna is hushing us. “This is it. He always does the Top Ten List after the first commercial.”

We’re in our pajamas, sitting on the couch, and I’m nervous for my dad.
Letterman
isn’t even live—it was taped hours ago—but I haven’t heard from him and I have no idea how it went. He could have fallen on his face or been drunk or accidentally said the F-word on the air. God only knows. Letterman looks up at the audience and raises a blue card over his head. “It’s time now, ladies and gentlemen, for tonight’s Top Ten List.”

Cartoon numbers count down from ten, and Anna and I smile at each other. It’s been a week since our fight. That’s what one of our fights generally looks like, two people saying hurtful things to each other without raising their voices. Sometimes I think I might prefer movie fighting, where everyone yells and then has sex in the next scene. She technically apologized yesterday, but it was one of those married-people apologies, more of a tactical move than anything else, a way of moving on with things.

“The category tonight, from the home office, Top Ten Perks to Winning the Pulitzer Prize. Have you ever won the Pulitzer, Paul?”

“No, but I’m working on some things.” Paul says. He’s wearing purple sunglasses.

“Not a lot of people know this about me,” says Letterman. “But I actually never learned to read.”

“Well, you’ve done well for yourself, sir. It’s an inspiring story.”

I’ve forgotten how much time they waste on this show, just bantering back and forth about nothing. I think of my father standing backstage behind that curtain, waiting. And then I find myself thinking about my mom. This happens a lot, particularly when I’m a little in awe of something my dad is accomplishing—some surreal, famous-person thing. She’ll inevitably show up in my head in voice-over format. She’s like the Morgan Freeman of my conscience.

He gets to be on TV, Thomas
, she says.
And I know that’s very exciting. But remember who was there for you when you fell off your bike the first time, or when that horrible little girl made you eat that worm and you cried in the passenger seat of my car when I picked you up from school.

“Oh come on already!” says Anna.

Letterman is making jokes now about some guy in the audience from Canada, and it’s going on and on. He keeps asking him if people in Canada are generally able to read. But then he finally clears his throat and gets back on task. There must be a producer off camera somewhere, frantically pointing to an imaginary watch. “Presenting tonight’s list is this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction and one of the world’s greatest living writers, Curtis Violet. Come on out, Curtis!”

My dad steps out onto the stage in a blue blazer and an open-collared shirt. Anna and Allie clap along with the audience and Allie says, “Grandpa” as if this six-inch version of him can hear her. He waves and smiles.

“Top Ten Perks to Winning the Pulitzer Prize. Take it away, Curtis. Number ten.”

The drummer starts a faint drumroll and my dad eyes a spot just above the camera. “I get an exclusive ten percent discount on my next purchase at participating New York area Barnes & Noble booksellers.”

“That sounds like a pretty good deal,” says Letterman. “Number nine.”

“Now maybe I’ll be famous enough that people will stop asking me if I wrote those sexy vampire books.”

“Number eight.”

“I’ve just been hired as head writer on MTV’s
The Hills
.”

“Number seven.”

“I get to make up my own creepy religion for movie stars and weirdos. It will be called Violetology.”

The crowd likes this one, and Letterman laughs. “Number six.”

“I no longer have to pretend that I’ve read
Gravity’s Rainbow
.”

And just like that, the audience turns and goes completely silent. Curtis looks over at Letterman and shrugs.

“Well, I guess we really shouldn’t have expected much more than that, huh?” says the host. “Number five, Curtis.”

“I’ve finally earned enough street cred to have that fruitcake Tom Wolfe whacked.”

“Number four.”

“From now on, the patches on the elbows of my tweed blazers will be made from one hundred percent
real
endangered species skin.”

“That doesn’t really seem like something to celebrate. Number three.”

“Screw the financial crisis. I have enough money in my wallet right now to buy everyone in the audience a used Dodge Neon.”

Television has filled him out somehow, and he looks like a younger, happier man. It’s like he’s at Politics & Prose bookstore in D.C. for the hundredth time giving a reading and not the Ed Sullivan Theater on national television. One hand is poised in his pocket, the other gesticulates casually as he talks. He is my idol.

“Number two.”

“John Grisham and Stephen King have to mow my lawn for a whole year.”

“And the number one perk to winning the Pulitzer Prize,” says Letterman. The drumroll heightens and my dad smiles at the camera.

“Fabio has finally agreed to do my next book cover.”

The band breaks into music, and then, with another quick, professorial wave, Curtis is gone.

“Is that it?” Allie asks. I guess she’s unimpressed.

“My God,” says Anna. She reaches for my hand and I take it without even thinking—a reflex of love. “He didn’t even look nervous. Can you imagine going on TV and being so . . .
cool
?”

“I wonder if he was stoned,” I say, but she’s right. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve imagined what it’d be like to be my father.

Half an hour later, after a series of surprisingly complex questions about how television works, I manage to wrangle Allie into bed. Her eyes are big and she’s jittery from all the excitement, like she’s been sneaking handfuls of coffee beans since dinner, and I wish it was legal to fasten children to their beds. We’ve agreed to skip reading a story tonight, since it’s after midnight, but she’s demanding two stories tomorrow. Parenting is often about negotiating.

“Is Grandpa Curtis coming back to stay here? With us?”

I tell her that I don’t know and that he might be staying in New York for a while, and she just frowns at me.

When the phone rings, I tell Allie good night and rush out of the room. I can hear Anna drawing a bath on the other side of the house. I already know who it’s going to be.

“Did you see it?” he asks.

I settle onto the bed with the phone. “No. Jimmy Kimmel had Carrot Top on, so we decided to watch that instead. I love that guy.”

“Did I look old to you? I thought I looked kind of old. They put so much makeup on me. I felt like I was in drag.”

“Well, you are pretty old, Dad. But you didn’t look
bad
old. You looked
cool
old. Sort of like Mick Jagger.”

“You think anyone got that
Gravity’s Rainbow
joke?” He sounds quiet and tired. His voice has a cavernous sound when he’s calling me from his loft, like he’s at the bottom of a well in the Midwest somewhere.

“Hell no, of course they didn’t. But I think that was kind of the point, right? I don’t think people even pretend they’ve read
Gravity’s Rainbow
anymore. They pretend to have read much smaller books now.”

“You ever read it?” he asks.

“Of course. Like twice.”

“Yeah, I haven’t, either. I don’t think anyone reads
anything
anymore—unless it’s about cutting carbs or fooling the perfect man into marrying you. At my reading today in Rockefeller, it was the same crowd of old people, like always. It’s the publishing industry’s dirty little secret. Readers are dying off.”

Like Allie, I’m restless, and so I get up and pace the room, stopping at the window to look at my dad’s car in our driveway. He took the train up to New York, so his keys are hanging from a nail in one of our kitchen cabinets. I could hop in it now and tear off across the Key Bridge like a video game. But, of course, I don’t. I hear ice cubes dropping into a glass as he pours himself a drink.

“I think you’re being a little dramatic,” I say. “Remember your deal last year at the PEN/Faulkner? It was like a Justin Timberlake concert. I saw kids shotgunning beers outside the building.”

“Those were just my students. They show up for all those things. It gives them an excuse to not be working on their own writing.” He goes on like this for a while, sipping his drink and sighing in my ear. “Do you think they’ll read me when I’m gone?”

“Who, your students?”

“I don’t know . . . anyone? The way they read the greats? Like Zuckerman. They’ll read Nicholas forever. He’s really something, the lonely old prick. Maybe
he
should have been on
Letterman
tonight.”

I think before speaking, arranging my dad’s books across a shelf in my mind. “They won’t read all of your books. A lot of them though. It might help if you gave them a few more. It’s been five years. Zuckerman’s published four since
Stairwell
came out.”

The moment this leaves my mouth, I regret it.
Stairwell
, Curtis’s last novel, is the only book my dad has published that one could reasonably call a failure, and he rarely ever mentions its existence. The
New York Times
wrote a highbrow, long-winded review that essentially boiled it down to one word:
boring
.

“I really thought people were going to like that one,” he says. “Believe it or not, I’ve never tried harder on a book. It was like giving birth to a cactus every day.”

“Well, maybe that was the problem,” I say. “You never seemed to be trying before.” This makes me think of my own problem, and how things seem to come easier when no one is thinking so hard.

Curtis is quiet for a while, and I know exactly what he’s about to say. “Have you spoken with your mother lately?” he asks, his default question again. If for these few minutes a window has been open, that window is now closed.

“No,” I say. “I was thinking of her tonight actually, when I was watching you. I need to call her. She’s been trying to get ahold of me. I’m having lunch with Gary this week though.”

“Well, that should certainly be intellectually stimulating,” he says, like some elitist asshole. This is his typical stance regarding my stepfather, a man whose only crime is that he’s never harmed anyone in his life.

“Nice, Dad.”

“I’m just saying, does the man have any interests besides cars? It’s like trying to have a conversation with a copy of Kelley Blue Book.”

“Why are you so depressed, anyway? Jesus, you were on TV tonight. This might come as a shock to you, but not everyone gets to go on
Letterman
.”

“I’m not depressed. I’m just . . . contemplative.”

And drunk, I think.

“Sonya wants me to do the
Today
show this week. Do you think I should?”

“Yeah, why not? But make sure Matt Lauer does the interview. Everyone else over there is bush league.”

Curtis turns away from the phone and whispers something, and then I hear a faint voice—a woman’s voice, of course. “Dad, are you with someone?”

“What?”

I feel silly for this, for indulging my father while he sits in his multimillion-dollar loft with whatever silly girl he’s managed to turn things upside for this time. It’s such a strange role that I play in this man’s life. He can’t walk down the street without someone telling him how brilliant he is, but still he calls me to mope.

“I’ve gotta go, Tommy. I’ll talk to you soon, OK?”

I can only sigh. “Good night, Dad.”